Sparklers

Hello – Moonlight Shadow here with a run down on one of the forgotten hero’s of bonfire night, sparklers! Well, perhaps not a forgotten hero, but still, not a firework type that really gets a lot of attention. Sparklers have already been covered a bit, so I’ll try and take this from a different angle, to consider a time when sparklers were, as children, the one type of firework that WE could hold. Which, in itself, was special.

In days gone by, firework shops – or rather, newsagents, there being few if any “specialist” firework shops back then in my area – sold fireworks on their own. I liked to pick these, and an adult bought them, and they were stored in a biscuit tin. Nice! But I didn’t light them. In fact, I don’t ever remember lighting a blue touchpaper firework in my life- by the time I was old enough, it was all fuses. Now, sparklers were different – we didn’t light them, but could hold them in a gloved hand, and make pretty patterns. Simple, but none the less, added an element of “doing” rather than just watching to the display- a passion that has never left me. I am never really happy just watching big Cat 4 displays – I’d much rather be doing my own Cat 3.